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Let's be clear, Bitcoin is an international asset. We are spending like drunken sailors. Bitcoin is the only economic entity where the supply is unaffected by the demand. If you want to preserve your wealth, you have to convert that currency into an asset that's scarce, desirable, portable, durable, and maintainable. All right, welcome back to Scarce Assets. Scarce Assets is a bi weekly podcast dedicated to exploring the investment landscape shaped by the paradigm of scarcity as the ultimate driver of value. As traditional investment struggle to provide real returns and Fiat currencies lose their appeal due to the basement, our show provides a forward-looking lens on how investors can preserve and grow their wealth in the 21st century. So this week, we have the pleasure of being joined by Peter Grosskopf, Chairman of Argo. So Peter, you are one of the founding investors and currently serve as the Chairman for Argo, a precious metals investment platform that enables secure and digital access to physical gold. With over 35 years of experience in the financial services industry, Peter served at as the Chief Executive Officer of Sprott for 12 years from 2010 to 2022. During that time, he he drove the growth of the fellow Sprott family company from 5 billion to more than 20 billion of assets under management. Peter is a CFA charter holder and earned an honors degree in Business Administration and a Masters of Business Administration from the Richard Ivy School of Business at the University of Western Ontario. Peter, thank you for joining Glenn, Tim and I today. How are you doing? Great. Thanks and thanks for having me on the show. Thank you. We appreciate it. So I just shared a little bit about your bio. There's obviously a ton that we could unpack there in over 30 years of your career in traditional finance and precious metals. But maybe the best place to start would just be sharing more about your time at Sprott and now leading Argo. Could you just share about your background, how you transition from traditional finance and ultimately finding gold and precious metals as a attractive asset class that you wanted to anchor your career to? Sure. Well, it wasn't very well planned when I, when I left university, I joined a bank out of Business School. I quit that job before I I started and I started in with a friend of mine at a small brokerage firm in Canada and I was handling futures and options. So that was my first exposure to gold. I was quite young. I was one of the young, youngest traders there. I kind of had a math background and finance background and I was one of the first young guys to be trading gold futures and gold options at the time. So I kind of got an early education in gold. I then went back, did my MBA and became a banker and spent many years heading a couple of different investment banks and covering the gold sector from a corporate point of view, a corporate and a banking point of view. And one of my great clients in those days was Eric Sprott. Eric had found an investment firm of his name and he asked me to come over and be the CEO in 2010 goal that just had a phenomenal 10 year run. Eric had made the call of a lifetime. So money had been pouring in and then we went through basically six really tough years when when gold was doing its pullback and the Chinese super cycle ended. And it was, it was tough to build sprout in those days and and we started very slowly, but there was nobody else really solely focused on precious metals. And over time we won fans both institutionally, retail, a lot of US investors. And it was one of my proudest moments really sticking it through and building Sprott to be the powerhouse that it is now. So I left. I retired a couple of years ago and started on a on a few other gold investments, including Argo. Awesome. Appreciate that background. It's, it's fascinating. We'll get more into the conversation in a bit, but I think it's interesting. I didn't know that you started on the derivative side and trading gold futures and options. And now the work that you do at Argo will be, is more focused on the physical asset versus the derivatives. And I know we'll talk a lot about paper claims on the, on the price of gold, but just fascinating to hear that journey and, and now you're focused on, you know, physical security, the asset versus the derivative market. I'd be curious to just dive in a little bit more into you mentioned you, you joined Sprott, given the relationship that you had with Eric as a client of yours on the banking side and how did Eric see the opportunity in gold, you know that that bull market, how do they know to position himself? And then ultimately what was it like for those couple of years where you joined? You mentioned it was just tough working through the bear market. What did you learn from that experience? Well, Eric being based in Canada, we, we have a natural affinity to, to natural resources and, and so we were always, you know, pretty adapt at investing in the gold sector. And Eric was big on junior gold companies probably for 15 years before he founded his own investment firm. He made one of the best calls I've ever seen, which is in the year 2000, he put a big banner up for his clients and it said get out of NASDAQ and get into gold. And he, he timed that perfectly from what I couldn't recall about April of 2000. And his, his, his premise was NASDAQ and, and the money printing had just already gone so far at that time that you needed to take respite in, in a hard asset. And, and gold was very cheap as I recall then probably 400 less than $400.00 an ounce. And he timed it absolutely perfectly. So that built sprout up very quickly after that, you know, 10 years of incredibly good results and I joined after those 10 years. So it was kind of just when, when it was going into a period of of a correction, what I'd call a correction. And it was a pleasure to to join Sprott because it had financial capacity, it had, you know, 4 billion of assets at the time. So it was no, no small firm but to transition it into a multi product company in gold and our our star product was the Sprott physicals physically backed even in those days we're talking has to be physically backed, has to be fully allocated, has to be, you know, able to be audited. And at that time that there was a lot of concern about the GLD, that the GLD was using contracts, that it didn't have all the physical gold that and that's how we built the spot physics up to be a global competitor. Yeah, no, that's, that's fascinating. So how does that tie in? I think Glenn had some questions, but maybe could you get us up to speed, Peter, just on where the market is today? It's a timely interview just because gold is approaching $3000 per oz. I think the all time high was last Monday the the 10th of February. Don't know the number off the top of my head, maybe you could tell us. But what's driving the surge in gold? And, and Glenn, I definitely want to get into some of those ideas you had around the paper market still. Sure. And I do think there's two great reasons for doing the interview now. The first of those is the overall gold price performance almost touching 3000. Everybody says, isn't it getting expensive? Hasn't it run too far against real interest rates, which the Fed has raised? You know, isn't it extended against the US dollar? And all those things are a little bit true. The sentiment is is running very hot for gold and, and it usually has periods of small corrections. But what's driving it is the debt and the deficits, pure and simple. People are increasingly nervous about the US Treasury and U.S. government that's running A2 to $3 trillion deficit at a time when the economy is doing very well. And against that and almost $40 trillion debt pile, which is now running interest is the highest single expense and it just seems to be out of control. And I think that those investors that have now in a very real way experienced purchasing power declines are saying I need protection. And, you know, gold is no longer this gold buggy inflation kind of buggy thing to buy. This is a real insurance asset that I need from My Portfolio. And I think that's what's driving the just the relentless, you know, gold price increases and, and, and ironically, the, one of the largest components of buying is governments themselves. So central banks are buying gold and you can't go against the for very long against the old dodge, which is don't fight the Fed. If if don't fight the central bank. If central banks are buying it, then households are going to be adding it too. Yeah. And so one of the things I've been reading about in the newspaper a lot, I'm not a gold expert, so I'm trying to wrap my mind around it, is we're seeing a lot of demand for physical settlements in the gold markets. And I've also seen, so I'm based here in London and, you know, the Bank of England, normally it takes a few days to get delivery of physical gold. Now they kind of saying 8 to 10 weeks or something like this, which always kind of gives one pause for thought. You know, if you go to the bank and say I want my money and they say, well, there's a delay, There's a pause. It doesn't matter if it's a cryptocurrency exchange, just a normal bank or a gold vault. It's like, hang on a second, what's going on here? You know, they've got these kind of excuses about truck drivers and the weights of the gold and whatever. But I mean, that's always the case, right? So and also what I'm seeing is that the Comex gold, the amount of physical they have has spiked up a lot, right. And so they seem to be the sort of transatlantic kind of part to this. And then I've also heard stuff about like the Shanghai gold market and physical delivery there and kind of how all this ties into sort of geopolitics and kind of concerns about, you know, I mean, we are, we obviously all know about what happened with Russia seized assets back in 2022, things like that. So just if you give us your understanding of kind of what I've painted as, you know, very broad brush kind of outline, they have just snippets that I've heard here and there. Could you kind of decipher what what's actually going on here? Sure. Well, gold is a very liquid asset, trades somewhere between depending on how you count at 100 billion to 200 billion a day makes it the world's third most liquid asset behind U.S. dollars, U.S. Treasury bonds and possibly EUR. So it's it's in there at 3 or 4. Many of the trading contracts for gold are not physically backed or totally physically backed. There's two major sources of those paper contracts. 1 is the futures and options market on on primarily COMEX. And the second is the London unallocated gold pooled market, which are basically commercial banks trading gold contracts that are conceptually backed by physical, but you don't really know how much because you don't know how much physical the bank puts behind their commitments to deliver physical. So both those markets are levered in one way or another. And what you've got in the short term is with the tariff threat coming in and an increasing divide between nations moving materials between themselves, gold investors, I think rightfully get concerned that I want my gold closer. I want my physical closer to where I might need it one day. And and so COMEX, which is this massive levered market on gold paper claim gold is is rightfully stocking up in case they need to deliver against those contracts. So I think the exact number is moving from 15 to 30 million oz or something like that. And it's, I think understandably taxed the system for gold delivery. I mean you'd be taxing the fleet of Brinks trucks and 7:40 sevens in secure holes that can even move that gold. So I guess it's probably not surprising that the delivery times are widening out. But in an investor's mind, I think this strikes to the heart of it. Why do I want to own an asset that protects me from the financial system by owning it in a levered way through the financial system? It just doesn't make any sense. It's like you're buying insurance against the insurance company from the insurance company. It's you know, and so I think investors are are kind of just starting to separate church and state and say actually want my physical. In my view, that's a healthy delevering from the paper gold system and maybe the long term impact is to put a premium on physical gold that can be duly delivered quickly. So and you know, maybe paper contracts are going to start trading at a bit of a discount. And that's kind of what's happened with the, the contango and, and, and the reversal of the normal, you know, futures delivery system where the spot months are, are leading the, the, the, the out months. Yeah, 'cause what I So what I've. So I started researching this topic and I mean, there doesn't seem to be anything reliable in terms of a sort of a very verified source, but I've read that they could be as as many as 100 times the paper claims as there is actual physical vault, right? And so. You know, obviously in a commodity, so this whole show is about scarcity, right? But you kind of, you take something that's scarce, like gold, verifiably scarce, right? And then you inflate it's sort of supply in inverted commas by 100 times, right? Over, I don't know over what period those paper claims on gold have come into existence, but I imagine it's decades, right? And I just wonder, I mean, that's, that's a huge amount of leverage, right? Like if there was something were to happen where everybody wanted physical at the same time, so there was sort of a metaphorical run on the banks or a run on physical gold, what do you think would happen? Because obviously there's not enough to fulfill this claim. So it would be like there would be defaults, right? Yeah, I think that look, it wouldn't take 100 to one. I I personally believe the ratio is lower than that. I think it might be 100 to one in the trading markets. But if you're actually talking about longer term ownership of gold, I, I think there's, there's significant leverage, but you know, it's probably a lesser ratio. But let's just say it was 12:50 for arguments. Even if you had a squeeze on a 12:50 leverage ratio for delivery, you'd have some defaults, people that couldn't deliver, financial institutions that couldn't deliver the physical and the, and the allotted time, traders who would hold them accountable, investors who would hold them accountable. And and you'd, you'd get some breaking of the shorts. So it doesn't mean that the global delivery system for gold, which is traditionally been commercial shorts is finally going to get squeezed. I do think it's going to get a little squeezed here. So you know that that that is what happens when a when a scarce asset is overly shorted and and overly, you know, portrayed through through paper claim. Yeah. I have a question, Peter, just on what what you just described in the past five minutes or so. Are those predominantly sovereigns and central banks that are asking for physical gold to be delivered or are there other investors that are doing this now? Like what what are you seeing? I know you said this is partially in response to tariffs. Are there other things that are driving this as well? Well, I would say by and large, the the whole institutional and investor custody system, if, if they have clients that have asked for physical gold are, are perhaps no longer willing to take, you know, a paper gold delivery commitment by a bank, They, they want the physical. So I think just in general, people want it closer to their, to their own pockets, to the clients they've promised it to. I don't know if central banks always demand physical. I would think that based on the whole US using the SWIFT system to punish foreign countries for not adhering to its principles, I do believe foreign countries probably want the golds in in the nation that they've purchased. So they probably want physical. And I just think in general the preference is going to be to move to physical now. Yeah, because it's sort of like it reminds me of kind of the history of money, right? Because I mean, essentially we had like a kind of a classical gold standard until sort of roughly, yeah, early 1900s, right, depending on. And then, you know, that kind of broke down. And then we had the braided wood system. And then in 1971 we had the Nixon shock, right. And it was, it was an analogue of this, right, Because it was essentially we were creating paper claims. Well, the dollars themselves were meant to be backed by gold. So dollars were paper claims, were meant to be paper claims on gold, right? And then we got into a situation where they were issuing more dollars than there was gold backing at a 35 out of $35 peg. And now it's like, OK, so now we've got the dollar system, but now we've got the separate gold system. But the same thing seems to be happening in the gold market where we've got all these paper claims against gold and, you know, we've inflated the gold supply. And I'm just wondering what you think that's done to the price of gold, because obviously this is about supply and demand, right? So if you 10X the supply of something and everybody's sort of pricing it as if each paper claim is an actual physical amount of gold, yeah, I mean, that must have suppressed the price of gold significantly over the years, right? I mean that the allegation widely, you know, belief by the gold community is that paper, paper claims have suppressed the gold market and commercial shorts have suppressed the gold market, especially at certain points in time. In fact, banks have gone, you know, have gotten prosecuted for artificially suppressing precious metal prices. So that's been the long standing allegation. I think what happens is that in the gold market there is a referee and the referee is the investor. And if the investor wants physical and doesn't want a claim on, on physical, doesn't want a paper claim, then they will demand physical delivery and the referee will blow the whistle and, you know, you'll get a sorting out. So I, I think some of that has had an impact on gold demand in the last two months. But you know, it's kind of more of a long term trend that, that I think still has to play its way out. And I think it, it, it's superseded by the bigger issue, which is that in the Fiat currency market, there is no referee or, or I should say, the referees on the side of the winning team, which is central bank. And he's just constantly allowing the central bank to, to, to, you know, to, to incur penalties, meaning to penalize and investors because they just keep printing more Fiat currency and they think of fancy acronyms to do that and programs and in order to sell it to the population. But they're really debasing the currency, right? And we all see it and we see it every year. And all you have to do is look at the gold market, which has a referee and the Fiat currency market, which has a referee that's on the side of the issuing team. And you take a look at gold's performance against Fiat currencies over 2025 years. You could do the bars and in fact incremental research has done at the world's 10 most significant currencies and trace them over 25 years. So 250 cells on that table. Gold rarely loses because Fiat currencies constantly depreciate. And I guess the other thing about the referee is he gets to tell you how much they're depreciating by and he's saying we can contain it to 2% and it's actually 3, but all the rest of us know it's 5:00 to 10:00, right? But the, the referee's biased. So he's telling you it's two. It's, it's, it's the biggest lie going at on ramp. We believe that Bitcoin is the most important asset of the 21st century. The hard part is securing it right. There are shortcomings with keeping your coins on an exchange, but also with setting up your own self custody arrangement. On Ramp solves for these concerns. Our multi institution custody solution maximizes security and minimizes counterparty risk, ensuring that your Bitcoin remains securely in your possession and provides built in inheritance planning to ensure your family is protected as well. On Ramp provides Peace of Mind for your Bitcoin journey, whether for your whole stack or for part of it as a compliment to your existing self custody set up. For more information, check us out at on rampbitcoin.com. Yeah, Peter, one, one thing I wanted to touch on there as well. As you mentioned some investors feel that your sentiment might be too hot for gold, right. It it just breached a new all time high last week approaching $3000 per oz. But to your point, when you compare it to a system that is structurally flawed and you have a referee that is playing for the winning team, that is, that's just human incentives. And there's really no reason to believe that that will ever change because we've seen decades and centuries of this phenomenon, right? So I know in the United States, there's the Department of Government efficiency that aims to contain some of the deficit spending. But in reality, I I think it'll kind of fall flat on its face or stated objective of doing so just because you pointed out there's, there's so many entitlements, there's the interest expense, it's ballooning. And so now how do you think about where gold is currently valued? And just looking a year ahead or five years ahead, how do investors in your circles think about gold's valuation and what's to come there? Well, short term it's run a bit hot and you know, due to these delivery concerns and and and could experience some volatility or even a pullback. I'd be completely comfortable with that. I think that it's clearly pointing the way to 4000 within the within call at the next couple of years. Personally, I believe that that will be absolutely stoked the next time the Fed has to print. And I don't know what they'll call that printing. I, I don't know if it'll be called quantitative easing. They'll probably come up with a new name for it, but you know, reverse repo facilities, whatever's required to keep this incredibly large debt bubble from bursting, They will, they will do what's required. So I personally see that happening when the economy weakens off, ironically as a result of the government getting more efficient. You know, the government's been the largest net employment adder in in this economy. They start letting people go. I think you could probably see the economy follow behind pretty quickly. So if the economy gets soft and they really need to start easing and they may need, you know, some kind of relief program for people that are behind on debt payments or what have you, you know, then I think gold is really going to start spiking. I think we're going to get into more of a hyperbolic type type situation, more like what we saw with Bitcoin. Can you explain something to me and maybe kind of overlay it on what you see going forward? Because so I would in the run up to and during the great financial crisis and kind of the first couple of years of that, like you saw a big run up in the gold price. And then like from sort of, I don't remember exactly when it was, but about 2011 to 2012, we kind of, well, first of all, we had a big pullback in the gold price and then kind of recovered back to where it was before. But I think that took like 7-8 years or something like that at a time when interest rates were super low that I mean, the money supplier was, you know, increasing a lot. And so you sort of see something similar going forward or or potentially even more, you know, more extreme. But it's just like I'm what I'm, the question I'm really asking is why did we see that pull back, you know, during a period when you would have thought that gold would have been performing really well? Because if we're predicting that going forward, how do we know that we're not going to, for whatever reason that happened, see that as again? Well, at the time, from what I recall, the Fed was so busy printing to get us out of the financial crisis that the game was really to play the recovery and other markets, real estate, bonds as they were lowering rates, stocks, nobody saw the need for protection. So gold fell because people just didn't care, I think in those days. And it was still a much smaller, much lower participation level type of market than it is now. So you really had an apathy towards gold during those years. And it wasn't the game didn't get going again for gold until people really saw the printing and the printing around COVID and, you know, asset inflation, like everything was just running and you needed some gold to protect yourself. And, and, and that insurance bet has what's been steadily increasing over time. Peter, you mentioned the participation rate. Can you talk a little bit about what that looks like today, along with how investors might think about their gold allocation compared to maybe a decade or two ago? Sure. Well, I'll go all the way back to the 80s. It was really only gold bugs, you know, serious inflation bugs that were buying gold. In the in the 80s hedge funds got involved and in the 90s institutions, some institutions got involved with, with some core holdings. And you know, the whole time gold ownership was a lot higher in Europe than it was in in North America. I don't think gold became a broader institutional asset class until the founding of the ETFs, which I believe was 2004 at that time. And we were kind of getting on to it at Sprott with the physicals. We estimated at that time it was kind of two to 5% of institutions bought gold and usually it was at a 1% type of waiting. So I think that 2% is probably up closer to 2025, but it's still only at a 234 percent waiting. So it's still a quite a low participation rate. I mean, there's, there's less participation in gold and there would be an Apple or Tesla, for instance. Obviously you know, we're we're involved in the Bitcoin market and it sounds, you know it rhymes a lot with what we particularly with the ETF launches last year and now the institutions coming in and it's kind of even lower percentage as an institutional portfolios, you know sub 1% usually. Yeah, the difference is with gold it's taken 200 years and with Bitcoin it's happened in five. You know all the adaptation is faster with Bitcoin it seems. Yeah, yeah. Do you find that like among your client base there's a care demographic split or do you find that like it's young and old kind of even in spring across your client base? Do you mean gold or Bitcoin or the comparison? Gold. Yeah, because I'm, I always kind of think that, but I mean, this is just sort of, you know, my own perception of some based on the evidence or anything like that with younger folk kind of skewed towards Bitcoin and the older folks skewed towards Bitcoin. I mean, absolutely, yeah. Absolutely. OK. I mean, this gets into the Argo business plan a bit, but traditionally you've been able to buy gold if you were a bank customer. And by the way, if you did, you got your face absolutely ripped off by the banks on their storage and trading costs or you had access to ETFs inside a brokerage account. And that generally defines the baby boomer generation and older. So gold was kind of known as a, an old, an old man's market. And I think Bitcoin is generally a younger entrepreneurial market, you know, 24/7 trading on your phone, that type of thing. My grandfather, because when my grandfather passed away, so you lived like a family trust and what have been, I was a basement professional and you know, was asked to have a look at what was going on there after he passed away. No one really understood in basement. And like he had about 60% of the family's trust in gold. Yeah. And he actually grew up during the Great Depression, right. So I think that kind of potentially influenced him, like what I saw going on there. And also this 29, you know, the the the stock market crash about then. Yeah. So it's just, it's just fascinating how far this goes back and also how it's kind of a generational kind of thing where depending on where in history you were born. Yeah, a different view of asset classes and things. But you know, I think we all learn that from experience. And to put my own into context, OK, I probably have about 40 to 50% of my assets in gold and precious metals and mining investments in one way or another. I've just grown up with it. I've been comfortable with it. They've done well. Obviously, it's probably more than the average person would ever feel comfortable. I am a Canadian and our country over the last 20 years from being kind of a part of our country with the US has been run by a left wing, left-leaning government that has absolutely gutted the productivity of the country. I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's criminal what's happened. Our currency has gone from par to 69 cents, OK. And I spend when I travel most of my time in the US or, or you know, US based economies, I have been dramatically hurt by having far too many assets in Canadian dollars. OK, I should have had more of my money in gold. So in terms of putting it into context, all you need and you take a look at those currency charts again, all you need is to have sat there in Japanese yen or Canadian dollars to understand why you're absolutely making a huge mistake if you don't have some money in gold. I can. And you know, it could happen. It could happen to the US dollar one day, although I think that's probably it. It'll never lose or not for a long time lose its status as the as the leader, but you'll just see it in inflation. I mean, I can definitely commiserate. I mean, living here in the UK, it's a very similar picture. You know, even the so-called Conservative Party are, you know, very socialist. And now we've actually got the Labour Party and and they're spending money like drunken sailors that we just don't have. And yeah, you know, and it's going to end up, you know, a train wreck. I mean, if you look at the FTSE 100, right, it's gone nowhere in like 15 years. And then you price it in gold and you kind of lost half of your money. Yeah, exactly. But no, no, no professional money manager wants to show you that chart. Yeah. Peter, appreciate you sharing where you sit personally said 40 to 50% in gold, precious metals, mining related investments. You mentioned that participation in the institutional community was 2 to 5%. I think you said a few decades ago and maybe now closer to 20%, but it's still single. But that's then got to be multiplied by their participation, which is again 2 to 5%. So it's pretty small. Yeah. So how does that tie in then for, call it, the next decade then do you see a shift to gold becoming more of a strategic asset allocation because investors are predominantly more concerned about having assets closer to home, geopolitical tensions, trade wars, etcetera? Yeah. Look, the kind of risks that we sit with, with the deficit that is out of control, OK, Everybody, I think generally accepts the deficits out of control and the debts out of control. Nobody seems to really think about how that's going to get solved. So let's just push that off for another day. But they've been happy to be in these other markets like bonds that have offered them negative real returns in the last three years and stocks that are trading at probably their all time highest valuation multiples and real estate, which is starting to get hurt a little bit. Wait until you see how the government taxes that going forward and you'll see some real pain. But generally, people have not felt the need to have gold. I think that investors are doing themselves a huge disservice not to have a hard asset kind of scarce assets stockpile of at least five to 10% and you can go to your favorite assets in that you can go to Bitcoin, you can go to gold, which by the way, I'm increasingly seeing as interchangeable assets. It's and, and then that's why we built Argo is to facilitate the, you know, the, the inter trading between them. But you need 10% of your money in that just as a protection against what's been built up here, the imbalances that have been built up for 50 years and are now, we're just starting to see the cracks, right? I'm, I'm starting to come around to the combination of Bitcoin and gold. I've been very focused on Bitcoin, but like I've been sort of partially convinced now because Bitcoins a lot, I mean, so much more volatile than gold. And if you need a replacement for the fixed income portion of your portfolio in particular, actually all of the portions that you mentioned, right? You know, particularly for older folks who are drawing an income on their portfolio or drawing down the capital on their portfolio, you know, it's inappropriate to have 100% Bitcoin, right? Or you know, very high allocations. But going back, So I'm, I'm starting to think you know, and, and I totally agree with you. There's a asset manager in here, here in London called Troy and they have a strategic asset allocation of about 10% in the of gold in the portfolio. Yeah. And they, you know, they, they, they get very high risk adjusted returns because of the diversifying effect of the gold in their portfolio. And then obviously of a quite a protracted period in the last five years, you've gotten sort of 13% comp. So it has some sort of cost to you in terms of performance as well. So it kind of dampens the portfolio volatility at the same time as giving you kind of like equity like returns. So yeah, I'm definitely starting to come around to the idea of kind of a, like you said, a hard asset kind of bucket in the portfolio. And I, I'd be advocating for, you know, probably 1/4 of the portfolio to look at that moment at least. Yeah, well, to, I've, I've sat with so many different capital allocators and portfolio managers talking about this. And I think the old notion that a 6040 portfolio, you know, 40% bonds, 60% stocks can, can provide for their retirement and, and succession and, you know, to be, you know, to A, to a family's net worth overtime. I think that's just so old fashioned now. First of all, bonds have basically become, in my view, certificates of confiscation. I mean, they're promising you in many cases a flat real yield. And and that's, that's because I use higher and implied inflation rates. Stocks are are great, but there's such a game being played with indices now and the Magnificent 7 that stocks could be great and you could still wake up one day and they'd be down 30% and nothing would have changed. And and so that 6040 portfolio does not do you justice. And so you've got to have a separate portfolio that's kind of the counterbalance. And I think in that portfolio you might have Bitcoin as your risk on gold as your risk off. I would use very little cash or treasury protected inflation, you know, tips and certificates. I'd, I'd use that in a small proportion. Maybe you'd have some real estate in there, some land. I just think that that's a necessity now to have that counterbalance portfolio. Yeah, I. Totally agree with you there, Peter. The the one thing I like to anchor back to, I think it was in 2020, Hirshman Capital put out a report about sovereign debt crises and 51 out of 52 countries that exceeded, I believe it was 130% debt to GDP defaulted in some way, whether it was an explicit default or just a monetary debasement. So countries like Canada, the United States have been on that path of debasement for a while now. I think it became quite obvious in 2020 to many investors what's going on here. But to your point, there's still so much capital locked into legacy or antiquated portfolio construction frameworks with having 40% of that exposure to fixed income. So I do think both of our businesses are, are positioned well to welcome investors to allocate more of their capital to scarce assets in place of those certificates of confiscation. You had mentioned, you know, in closing, before we wrap up here, just want to share or get a little bit more context from you on Argo. I think what's fascinating is there's a lot of alignment between our brands. You focus on physical gold, we focus on the physical Bitcoin asset and security first and foremost. How did you and the Sprott team know in the early mid 2000s to focus on physical and how is that ultimately informed the decisions that you've made with Argo? Sure. Well, Argos is all about physical gold outside of the financial system direct to vault and our predecessor company Sprott Money was in that business allocated separate bars and storage for investors also sold coins and and and direct physicals. Argo is more of a digital representation of that. So efficiency, 24/7 trading, easy fills, easy access to the vault, Our pledge that Argo is to provide expertise to investors to know how to Best Buy that vault storage and where to Best Buy it. And I do think the big opportunity with Argo is gold is being tokenized, will have as its next big evolution a tokenization event. And you know, I'm familiar with the work of the World Gold Council and the LBMA on this. There's no reason that you can't have a global custodian of physically verified and approved gold in multiple vaults that should be able to be locked on the blockchain and traded amongst investors and no more need to move 740 sevens across the planet. It just eliminates so many inefficiencies in the gold market and it puts it much more on par with Bitcoin. And then for Argo, what we promised was to get smart about how you could take investors in between those two, so in between Bitcoin and gold, so that you could stay out of Fiat as much as possible. And and that's kind of the the vision that we have at Argo. Love it. How do investors that work with you think about their jurisdiction exposure? You mentioned investors want assets closer to home. You also mentioned that there's multiple vaults that investors could choose to park their physical with. Do you help as part of your expertise? Do you help your clients navigate those decisions and think about their exposures? Yes, we will. And again, it's our pledge. We've started with an an excellent deal with the Royal Canadian Mint. I mean, we, we trust our sovereign mint in Canada for storage. That's the premise on which the Sprott physicals were also built. I would say about half the investors in the US are comfortable with that and in fact prefer it out of the reach of the hands of Uncle Sam, so to speak. But half of them don't prefer it. Half of them would rather see brink storage in New York or or or Salt Lake. Unfortunately, right now that costs a bit more than our solution in Canada. So we will get there, but we want to have purchasing power. We want to strike a good deal for vaulting in the US. We also want to strike deals in the UK and Zurich and probably Singapore. So we, we want to have this kind of expertise to, to tell investors you should consider this, you should consider this token. You know, the tokens will probably have different jurisdictions for their gold or you'll have a Co location token. So you'll, you'll take a, a global token and you'll swap it for a buck for taking your storage out of Canada and into the UK, for instance. So the system will be set up to be efficient and we we've just pledged to be at the forefront of it. Excellent. And what type of investors are you working with predominantly? Both retail and institutional, so institutional can negotiate a better deal with us for fully allocated physical storage. Retail, we're starting with a fractional physically backed product and we are creating a a user base of retail customers. Now we're launching in the US that's that's live on on the Argo website. Awesome. Anything else that we didn't cover today that you think folks should be aware of? No, but I, I think that people need to spend more time in this area and, and, and figure it out. And I think they need to have trading accounts and investment accounts outside of the financial system so they can have this kind of exposure. Awesome. And Peter, where should people get in touch with you to learn more? On the Argo website please. Awesome. Yeah. Thanks so much for the time. Really appreciate you coming on. OK, thanks for having me. Thanks for listening to this week's episode of the show. If you found the information valuable, please share the episode with a friend or leave a rating on your favorite podcast app. All the links we discussed in today's show will be in the show notes inside your podcast app. Before we finish, a quick reminder that On Rat Media is for informational and entertainment purposes only, and nothing should be construed as investment or legal advice. Regardless of where you are on your Bitcoin journey, we'd love to hear from you. Visit onrampbitcoin.com contact to schedule a consultation with one of our private client advisors.
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